Unholy Blood
by sapphirerosha110
Summary: Death came at last to claim my soul, but I was filled with unholy blood and she could not contain me.
1. Awakening

**Disclaimer: I do not own Vampire Diaries**

**Author's Note: The latest of my Elena/Damon romance ideas, taking place between seasons 3 and 4.  
**

For the second time in my life, I was falling into Wickery Creek.

Water flooded the car, and Matt was knocked out, he probably hit his head on the steering wheel. Damn thing was built before airbags were required.

I shook him to wake him up, but it was no use. I yanked on my seatbelt but it was stuck. My lungs were already starting to burn, but I tried to call his name anyway.

And then Stefan appeared by the driver's side window. He reached across Matt to help me but I pushed him away, pointing to Matt. I had cheated death once in this river, and it had come back for me. Matt was probably the only innocent person left in Mystic Falls, and virtually the only human I knew. He had to live. He was hope, hope that one day the town could return to the quiet, sleepy southern town it had been before the vampires, witches, and werewolves took it over.

Stefan's eyes were filled with pain and he reached for me again, but I pushed him off.

He ripped Matt's seatbelt with an offhanded stroke and pulled him out through the window that was perpetually rolled down because the crank was stuck. I smiled a little, knowing Matt would be safe.

My chest heaved with the effort of holding my breath, my mind knew that I couldn't breathe, but my body didn't care. I coughed once, then water rushed in through my nose and mouth, burning, making me cough again and gasp again, but there was no air. There was just the icy blue water. The world began to fade to black and I knew that my brain was losing oxygen.

My last thoughts were of Stefan. They always were, when I was planning to die. I imagined him as I first met him, embarrassingly exiting the boy's bathroom after jumping down Jeremy's throat about his drug problem. I loved him, through the good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful. Even when Klaus had made it so that he forgot he loved me, I never gave up on him.

And then there was nothing. I was floating, and I couldn't tell if it was from the water, or from what came after death. I was surrounded by silence, darkness, and the soft sensation of floating. I could spend forever here, I thought. It was pleasant enough, even if there was nothing to see. There was nothing to be frightened of here. I had hoped that I would see my parents again, but perhaps the Doppleganger had a different destiny after death than humans, or even vampires.

I flew around aimlessly, the blackness never changing, but I had no sense that I would ever be bored. It was reassuring, the nothingness. Knowing I had no responsibilities, no destiny, and it occurred to me briefly that Damon was safe now, because Alaric would have died with me. That made me happy. The Salvatore brothers were safe a little while longer from the supernatural world.

Then I felt a tugging at my ankles, as though a whirlpool were sucking me down. It seemed like only a short while, but I was already used to the nothingness, and sensation frightened me. I tried to fight and move upward away from the vortex, but it was no use. I was rushing downward at a terrifying speed and then with a jolt I slammed down on my back on something very hard and cold and it made me gasp and sit bolt upright.

The gray tile of the Mystic Falls Hospital Morgue stood out in stark detail to my eyes. I had returned to the world and that could mean only one thing.

I was in transition.


	2. The Memories

**This is currently what I'm writing in between long stretches of noveling for June's Camp NaNoWriMo. It's the only way I can push beyond 4,000 words/day (excluding the length of the fanfic) but I promise to continue it once my 50,000 noveling words are over.**

The world was too bright, too sharp, even though it must be dark outside. I was still gasping when I rolled off the table coughing. I still felt like I had water in my lungs, the liquid ice burning me from the inside out. I felt like I couldn't breathe.

My mind was expanded, my human troubles seemed petty. I knew I could remember things in greater number than I ever could before. My memory had been adjusted to accept the scope of dealing with an eternity of memories, provided I lived that long.

I searched the vastness of my memory and I could perfectly recall things that happened in my infancy, things that before were only dim, fuzzy memories, shrouded in the bright light of childhood innocence. I remembered the anger I felt when Jeremy was born even though I had only been two years old.

I resented my human life then. For a moment I hated my human body. It was so frail. How many times had Damon or Stefan just picked me up and carted me off like I weighed as much as a bag of dog food?

While these memories washed over me, I continued to cough, trying to get the water out of my lungs. Then I took a deep breath and was hit with a fire that made whiskey seem like water. It wasn't the water. It was hunger. I was in the morgue of a hospital, surrounded by the organs of autopsy patients, and above me there was surgery, transfusion, broken bones that pierced skin.

The world pulsed with agonizing clarity. My skin crawled and my eyes felt ready to pop out of their sockets. Suddenly I realized what a testament it was to his values that Bill Forbes had resisted when he was in a hospital. I had never been good at resisting cravings of any kind. On my period I had been known to go through at least two bags of Hershey's kisses.

My heart still beat, faintly. That surprised me. I knew that there must have been some mechanism for blood circulation, since vampires didn't have blood pooling in their ankles, and they bled when cut by wood or teeth. My whole body felt parched, like I was trying to pass sandpaper through my veins.

I pitied Caroline most of all. She didn't even know what was happening to her. I was painfully aware, and I began having fits. The gurney I'd been brought in on was tipped over, I'd knocked all of the autopsy equipment off the table next to me, and one of the hanging overhead lights was swinging my a single connection and flickering intermittently.

I fled the morgue before I could do any more damage, and through an unfortunate accident, I stumbled upon a nurse carrying a blood bag, probably for a transfusion patient.

"Hey young lady, you're not supposed to be down here. Now I don't know how you got past the… what are you doing?"

Her words barely reached my ears, I was fixated on the elixir in her hand, and a war broke out within. Stefan would be ashamed of me. Becoming a vampire wasn't something I'd wanted. Maybe not for a few years, maybe not ever. There were so many things I wanted to do before I died. But I was dead anyway and death had spit me back out. If I took it, I could go on. I could do almost everything I'd wanted, except have children and grow old.

"You're too young to die." The words drifted back to me from after the accident. Uncle John had been standing in my doorway

"So were Mom and Dad."

"You are still a kid, you've hardly lived at all. I think it was the universe making a choice. You were too young to die."

The universe hadn't made the choice that night, my father had, making Stefan pull me from the car first. But John Gilbert had died for me, out of a father's love so that I could come back to life after Klaus drained me to become a hybrid. I hadn't believed him then, but I believed him now. I was too young to die.

I grabbed the blood bag from the nurse and tore it open with my teeth, draining the contents. Blood had always tasted bitter when I was human, whenever I'd gotten punched in the mouth or been forced to drink from a vampire who was either trying to heal me or threatening to kill me. This was better than the sweetest, richest triple cheesecake with chocolate I had ever had in my life.

It was thick and cold, and I could tell that my body craved more. I fell to my knees, the empty blood bag landing with a wet splat on the floor near one of the refrigerators where the pints were stored. As intense as the burn had been in my lungs, it moved to my mouth and I felt the fangs elongating from my gums, shifting the bones to make a canal for them to retract and shredding my flesh to accommodate their larger width.

I heard an animalistic snarl and realized it was coming from me. I looked up from my crouch at the nurse who was frozen in terror, watching me with terrified eyes. I felt the a prickling around my eyes as though I were sweating and knew that my eyes had turned crimson with the hunt, surrounded by rippling black veins.

It was then I promised myself I would never turn off my humanity. I couldn't disconnect myself from my still-living friends that way. But I knew this woman could not be allowed to live. I lunged at her and her scream was cut off as my fangs sank into the flesh of her throat. I missed her carotid artery by a few fractions of an inch, but my teeth had done enough damage that her blood still poured into my mouth. I raised my head and struck again, tapping the large vessel this time.

The flow pulsed with her heartbeat and I could tell when I was reaching the end of draining her because the pulses came farther apart and with a flutter as her heart tried to keep blood flowing when there was no more to be done. I let her drop to the floor and fell to my knees beside her, feeling intimately the loss of human life, because even though I was undeniably not human anymore, I had not been apart for so long that I could see it as just a meal.

My vampire heart was pumping vigorously, thought my chest gave no indication of it. My thirst had been slaked, for now, and I licked her blood clean from my fingers and wiped my mouth on the hem of her uniform. I had drained her almost completely dry, and the left side of her neck was an ugly, gaping wound. If Damon were here he would be looking over my shoulder, telling me I'd made rookie mistakes.

Then two memories hit me. The fog that shrouded certain areas of my mind had lifted, and I knew that they were formerly covered by compulsion. The first was the night my parents died. I had been waiting for them and a tall dark stranger had made up my mind about Matt, without me even realizing it. He'd told me that he wanted me to have a love that consumed me.

The second was of the same, tall dark and handsome man. This time he was standing in my bedroom, holding the vervain necklace Stefan, sweet Stefan, had given me as a protective gift. And he was telling me he loved me.

He had been a different man the night he told me that I needed a passionate love. He had come back to Mystic Falls looking for the ghost of a woman he once loved, who happened to look like me. I had watched him betray, murder, deceive and lie. And all the while he had been compared to the white knight who rescued me from certain death.

But I also remembered with perfect clarity all the times that he had been there for me when Stefan was gone. He saved my life, I saved his. He had been my escort in the competition for Miss Mystic Falls while Stefan was in the parking lot snacking on a competitor. Damon was a man who would do anything for me and I had turned him away because he did what needed to be done instead of pulling his punches the way Stefan did.

Maybe Elena the human could never fully love Damon, but Elena the vampire could.


	3. Fleeing

**Author's Note: I'm thinking that I may change the rating of this story to M because I'm realizing as I write that it is very dark and there are rather graphic descriptions of bloodfeeding. Also, it would open the possibility for other scenes between Damon and Elena later.**

**Also, a unit of whole blood weighs 474 grams, while a half liter bottle of water is 500. I operated under the assumption that vampires and their senses would be able to tell even that minute difference.**

_I have to get out of here_ I thought to myself as I took another look at the nurse on the floor. Someone would be coming soon to find out why she hadn't come back with the blood bag. My transition was over, and while the world was not still unbearably bright and loud, I could clearly hear the things happening above me if I tried.

"How could this happen? She was fine, she just…"

It was Stefan. No doubt talking to Meredith, the miracle doctor who didn't play by the rules. Then I realized what she must have done. I didn't have a concussion. It was bad, and Meredith didn't like to lose. Moreover, she knew she would have had Stefan and Damon to contend with if I had died under her care. So she slipped me someone's blood. So who was it that was responsible for turning me? Which line did I come from? Which vampire could I not kill? Stefan would be furious if it was his.

"You need to calm down, you need to be there for her."

It was Meredith. She was begging. He must have the tortured soul look on his face. It was almost pathetic, really, how terminally sad he was. When I was human I found it appealing that he felt remorse for his actions. Even as a vampire I was not particularly happy about his ripper side, because it would give the rest of us a bad name and bad publicity.

"How long do you think before she wakes up?"

Stefan didn't know that I was already awake? I destroyed half the morgue and made mincemeat of a nurse. He must really be distraught not to have heard, let alone any human staff that might have been in any surrounding area.

I didn't want him to see me like this. Not with fangs out, bloodstained, and wild with having just satisfied my newfound bloodlust for the first time. I spotted the narrow window at the top of the wall. It led to the outside from the basement morgue and I ran to it, knowing that Stefan would be on his way any time now to check on me and make sure that I was okay, as okay as I could be anyway.

I grabbed part of the broken light fixture and slammed it into the window. The shards of glass exploded outward and flew farther than they should have. I needed to watch my strength now, even though I would be no match for Stefan or Damon, I could accidentally kill a human.

I brushed the remaining bits of broken glass away with my bare hands, feeling a featherlike prickling. I looked down to see that my hands were bloody with minute cuts that knitted back together before my very eyes. I hoisted myself up and with very little effort was able to crawl through the window, feeling the same prickling on my stomach, and I noticed that my sweater was torn.

Then I ran.

The world flew by faster than I could have believed before my transition, and just as I was sprinting away, I thought I heard Stefan's voice coming from the morgue, but I ignored it as I fled into the night. I had run almost to the opposite edge of town before I finally stopped and realized that I knew where and what I was running from, but I had absolutely no clue what I thought I was running to. I couldn't go home, there was no one to let me in. I couldn't go to Bonnie's or Caroline's without explaining what had happened, because they had undoubtedly been told that I was dead.

So that left the boarding house. My body must have known better than my mind where I had to go, because I wasn't too far away from it. I tested my new speed again and found that it was very refreshing to be able to run so fast without growing weary or out of breath. I was a bit hungry again though. Basic metabolism I suppose, just farther up the food chain. I smiled a bit as I let myself into the darkened house.

I'd always felt uncomfortable there at night unless I had one of the Salvatores with me. Now, I felt as if I belonged to the darkness. I didn't turn any lights on, but I could see perfectly. I wandered around a bit, my appreciation for the old furnishings increased somewhat now that I could appreciate the feeling of eternity stretching before me, and knowing that I might one day have a collection of five hundred year old books in their first editions. Of course, they would be things like Twilight and Harry Potter. Not exactly Shakespeare or Chaucer material.

I wandered over to the bookshelf and pulled out Heart of Darkness, then laid it on one of the end tables. I took off my torn, wet sweater and threw it away in the kitchen before I made my way down to the basement and grabbed another blood bag from Damon's chest refrigerator. I hefted it in my hand, as a unit of blood was slightly less than a pint, but its density was higher than water. It felt ever so slightly lighter than a standard half-liter bottle of water.

The label noted that it was type B+ which Caroline was always raving was her favorite. I listened to her offhandedly, not particularly caring one way or another which humans tended to be sweeter or more full bodied, like talking about wine. Now it was something I needed to care about.

I walked back up from the basement and fished a copper saucepan from under one of the cabinets in the kitchen. I put it on the stove and poured about a third of the contents of the blood bag into it, noticing that the consistency of cold blood was truly vile. Then I had an idea.

I filled a bigger pot with water, added a pinch of salt, and set it to boil. I poured the blood back out of the saucepan into a bowl and washed it out, then coated the bottom with olive oil. I wasn't hard to find the ingredients for a tomato sauce in an Italian household, and I combined them, adding the blood last so it would just be heated through by the time the pasta was done.

I admit, it was a bit strange, and the whole idea struck me as rather macabre, but to an outside observer, I would be just another teenage girl eating a plate of spaghetti for dinner. The normal image was a lot harder to pass off sitting with a cup, or wineglass, filled with blood.

I set the plate on the arm of the sofa and picked up the book, holding it on my lap with one hand and eating with the other. The metallic sweetness of the blood perfectly complimented the acidity of the tomatoes and the tang of the garlic. I smiled to myself again, and realized there were a lot of foods that I could add blood to so I could get my nutrients, but people wouldn't have to know.

I heard the door to the boarding house open, and I knew that someone had come looking for me. It wasn't the smartest hiding place, as Stefan would think to check it first. But it wasn't Stefan who rounded the corner into the living room.

It was Damon.


	4. The New Me

**And now I'm doing the August session of NaNoWriMo. So here is my brain break from my Steampunk novel.**

"My first impulse is to yell 'You're alive!' But you aren't really, are you."

It wasn't a question. There was a look of pain on Damon's face mingled with exhaustion. He had obviously run from wherever he had been fighting Alaric.

"No," I said, closing the book and setting it aside on the couch. Damon moved slowly forward and took his place on the opposite sofa, head in hands

"I knew it. I knew when Ric died in my arms that…" Damon trailed off, pressing his entwined hands to his mouth, "you don't have to make the transition, Elena. I know that being a vampire was never something you wanted. I still haven't forgiven myself for forcing my blood on you when Klaus –"

"I already made the change Damon." I interrupted and looked him in the eye. He was beautiful with my enhanced vision. Almost glowing. I wondered if all vampires looked like that to a better trained eye. He sat perfectly motionless for a moment, then said

"You… what?"

"At the hospital, there was a nurse and I stole the blood bag she was carrying, then killed her."

A mildly impressed look crossed his face and then his brow furrowed again

"Whatever happened to not wanting to be a vampire, what about everything you wanted to do?"

"You mean everything I wanted to do before I died? My bucket list? I _drowned,_ Damon. I was dead, I was never going to get to do all those things I wanted to, and if I just let myself die, well to me that would be like giving up on the life I could have had."

"And have certain… memories started to resurface?"

"Worried that all the girls you compelled when they were human want to kick your ass as vampires?" I couldn't help being somewhat snarky. This was Damon after all.

"Not… worried necessarily…"

"I remember Damon. Everything that ever happened to me. I remember that night my parents died, when you told me that I needed a love that consumed me. I remember…" my voice cracked slightly, "I remember when you told me you loved me, and then you made me forget."

"I don't…"

"I never have to forget again. And I don't know if it's the memories, or becoming a vampire, but I forgive you for everything you ever did that made me push you away when I was human. All I saw was people getting hurt, and things that seemed unnecessary, but what I didn't see was that you are driven by love and always have been. All Stefan is driven by is his need for atonement."

"He's done a lot he has to atone for."

"But he doesn't have to be such a weepy baby all the time. Has he always been this annoying?"

"Since the day he was born." Damon smiled slightly then eyed my pasta

"Is the rest of the blood bag you used to make that still in the kitchen?"

"Yeah, next to the stove."

"I'll be right back." He said and I watched him as he walked into the kitchen. I finally understood what Katherine meant when she told me I could love them both. I loved Damon, I knew that. Possibly even before I became a vampire I knew it but I just wouldn't admit it because I thought of Stefan as my perfect protector.

Everything had changed, my perspective had changed. I promised myself I would never hurt anyone the way Stefan did when he went off the rails, but at the same time I couldn't blame Damon for indulging his appetites, and he had seemed to have stopped what seemed to be useless killing, drinking bagged blood from a highball glass with a distinctly civilized air.

I knew that one day I would have to tell Damon how I felt and deal with the repercussions of it, but I had all of eternity stretching before me. It didn't have to be tonight, especially when Stefan would be out searching the town for me at any moment.

Then Damon's phone rang

"Don't answer it!" I yelled

"But it's Stefan!" He called back, louder than usual, but I figured he hadn't adjusted his volume for my new ears

"I don't want to deal with Stefan right now. Let him believe you don't know what's happened yet."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. Let it go to voicemail."

When Damon walked back into the room he had a perplexed expression on his face.

"I thought you'd want to let Stefan know."

"He's going to make me feel guilty about a personal decision that I made because he couldn't handle being a vampire, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that's just not something that I want to deal with right now."

I wasn't eating anymore, just pushing the bloody noodles around my plate like a child waiting to be excused from the table. Damon seemed to notice. He moved around the coffee table and sat next to me on the couch, putting his arm lightly around my shoulders. A jolt ran through me at his touch that I'd never felt when I was human, and my heart would have fluttered if it could. I tried to think of something, anything else, but his scent enveloped me, and then his mouth was on mine.


End file.
